Survey and Analysis of Hardware Cryptographic and Steganographic Systems on FPGA

Little brooks make great rivers-says a proverb. Information science involves not only the efforts made for gathering, acquiring or collecting the data that corresponds to the information but also contains the ways to save it, protect it and preserve it. The meaning of the proverb however stresses upon how to protect and secure information, as a small leakage will pave way for entire loss of information which should be protected. True, there have been various methods, approaches and algorithms proposed in the past and will emerge in future too in the areas of secure information transmission. Cryptography and steganography have been primary sources for information security. The bird's eye view on the literature pertaining to the above mentioned two giants of information security spots a number of algorithms developed on both software as well as hardware platforms. This study does the survey from the literature on different cryptographic and image steganographic methods implemented on a reconfigurable hardware like FPGAs in the past. The analysis of various methods proposed earlier is also an important objective of this study.